The only pest with a monument.

In Enterprise, Alabama, there’s a monument to an insect. The town raised it in 1919: a statue dedicated, as the inscription says, in profound appreciation of the boll weevil and what it has done as the herald of prosperity. As far as anyone can tell, it’s the only monument on earth built to honor a pest.

It’s there because the weevil left no choice. It crossed up from Mexico in the 1890s and ate its way across the belt, and everything about how cotton was grown, financed, and handled had to change. Enterprise planted peanuts, prospered, and had the humor to say thank you. And when the industry finally decided the weevil’s time was up, it ran one of the great coordination campaigns in American agriculture. Grower-funded, decades long, zone by zone, it started with a trial in eastern North Carolina in the late seventies and did not stop until the weevil was gone from virtually the whole belt. Cotton doesn’t change often. When it decides to, nobody does it better.

We named the company after the thing that made cotton change how it works, because the next big change is a happier one. The flow of cotton, how fast it moves from the gin yard to the mill, is the next thing worth fixing, and the money says so. That’s what Weevil is for.